Microsoft re-crafts Live SkyDrive with HTML5

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 27 June 2011 11:36

Your IT - Home IT

Promising a 'faster, easier to navigate' version of SkyDrive that's 'more beautiful for photos', the service has been 'built for the modern web using HTML5'.

Microsoft, through its 'Windows Live' division, has announced 'major updates to SkyDrive', which Microsoft says is 'a single service for cloud access and sharing built for the modern web using HTML5'.

Claiming to have listened to its users through incorporating 'user feedback', SkyDrive has a 'brand new look' that promises a 'more fluid and efficient user interface'.

Microsoft certainly knows how to be tardy, with Windows Vista's birth testimony to that, but Microsoft also informs us that it still knows what tardy means when it tells us that 'this is the first significant new functionality announced for SkyDrive since it launched in 2007.'

Um'¦ what took so long, Microsoft? With Google in perpetual betas, updating its code every five seconds, was it really smart to let FIVE YEARS elapse between SkyDrive updates?

Leaving aside Microsoft's tardy ways for a moment, we learn from MS that its new updated SkyDrive 'puts content front and centre, and makes photos shine with the new layout that gets the chrome out of the way.'

Hmm, sounds like a not-so subtle dig at Microsoft's nemesis, Google, although at this moment we should cast our minds back to the entire aeons of time that passed between IE6's launch and IE7's, let alone SkyDrive's five year wait for a decent update.

Again leaving aside Microsoft's tardiness, we learn that SkyDrive takes advantage of IE9's feature-set, something that should surely come as no surprise to anyone.

Via IE9, SkyDrive delivers 'hardware accelerated graphics, modern HTML and Windows through IE 9 features like pinned sites'.

So after all of  that preamble, what the heck does SkyDrive actually do? Continued on page two, please read on!